


Damned

by DjaqtheRipper



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Polyamory, Post-Canon, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:54:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26206015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DjaqtheRipper/pseuds/DjaqtheRipper
Summary: There’s damned, and then there’s gypsy curses that run through blood, stronger than lust or money or power, dragging you down with a bullet through the sapphire marking a target over your beating heart, down through the cut, down in the tunnels where good men pretend they’re soldiers and die numbered instead of named. There’s damned, and then there’s cursed, and Tommy is both.So where do the damned go when they’ve died countless times but still find themselves breathing? The breathing dead go to Margate.
Relationships: Grace Burgess/Tommy Shelby, Tommy Shelby/Alfie Solomons, Tommy Shelby/Freddie Thorne, Tommy Shelby/Lizzie Stark
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	Damned

There’s damned, like the priests talk about, burning forever on your crisped charcoaled skin a billion miles from God, and then there’s _damned_ , alright? There’s damned, and then there’s gypsy curses that run through blood, stronger than lust or money or power, dragging you down with a bullet through the sapphire marking a target over your beating heart, down through the cut, down in the tunnels where good men pretend they’re soldiers and die numbered instead of named. There’s damned, and then there’s _cursed_ , and Tommy is both, has always been both. 

That gypsy blood runs thick through Tommy’s veins and pounds like war drums. It rings in his ears like gunfire, clogs his nostrils from the inside like the sulfuric stench of exploding shells, seeps into his lungs like cigarette smoke, drowns him like endless gulps of whiskey, like the chill waters of the canals in February when his mother waded deep and never returned alive. Tommy puts a gun to his own head and screams through the encroaching fog for oblivion. He thinks of oblivion as silence, just the slow steady silence of the earth in winter after the harvest has been cut away and the roots have been dug out. There’s a silence he craves, like brushing the sweat and mud off a horse after a fast ride, leaning in and winding his fingers through its fur and feeling in his soul the space between heartbeats, the infinite void between an inhale and an exhale through those powerful lungs that would make it a champion if only it didn’t have that gypsy blood, that mixed heritage that makes it as cursed as Tommy is, too beautiful to die and too wild to live. 

There have been countless wars and countless battlegrounds, both abroad and in England, countless casualties, loved and cherished and never forgotten. The bloody IRA, the Lee boys, the Crown, the Germans, the horrid Russian duchess and her equally horrid family, Billy Kimber, and Campbell of the Irish Constabulary, Sabini and Solomons and Changretta, and now the fucking British Union of Fascists and Oswald fucking Mosely, MP, springing up to cut Tommy down after all the others have failed. There’s a roaring on all sides now, threatening to consume him, and it feels everything and nothing like digging tunnels in France, disappearing into the dark of the earth surrounded on all sides by enemies. Tommy aches for silence. 

Silence doesn’t come. Tommy can’t pull the trigger. 

He wants to think that it’s because of his children. That would be the right thing, he thinks, if he couldn’t pull the trigger -- _pressing into his temple, feeling the blood beating underneath it, so fast, now, so easily stopped, and how many men has he done this to? how many men has he seen die this way in France, in Birmingham, in Camden Town? it would be easy, so easy, five pounds of pressure on the sensitive mechanism and boom, no more Tommy_ ̶̶ because of Charlie and Ruby and Lizzie, because of the family he has built, not to mention the family he was born into, brothers and sister and aunt Pol, his departed father and his dead mother and Uncle Charlie, Curly, Johnny Dogs, all the family he has ever had. He wishes it was obligation, solidarity, that keeps him from pulling the trigger. 

Instead, all he’s thinking is that he’s survived every war so far and it would be a waste to give up now. 

He won’t let the bastards have him this time. 

So where do the damned go when they’ve died countless times but still find themselves breathing? The breathing dead go to Margate.


End file.
